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Although the Periodic Table of Elements is an impressive feat of human understanding, scientists still find secrets about certain elements among its carefully arranged rows and columns.
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One such element is Promethium, and a new study from scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has successfully analyzed the chemical properties of the rare earth metal, some 80 years after its discovery.
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The team used a new technique to create a pure isotope of the element, and the discovery could make protecting this rare element easier while also advancing our understanding of lanthanide elements in general.
The Periodic Table of the Elements is a testament to the many millennia of human exploration of the chemical world. However, not everything is known about the elements that appear in the colored and carefully arranged rows and columns. One such element is Promethium.
First discovered 80 years ago in 1945, promethium is a lanthanide (one of a series of 15 metallic chemicals also known as rare earth elements) with the atomic number 61, and in the ensuing eight decades after its discovery, much of its retain chemical properties. a mystery. This hasn’t stopped its use – traces of the element can be found everywhere from smartphone screens to nuclear batteries – but studying it has proven difficult. That’s because it’s an extremely rare element that decays into other elements, meaning you can only really get Promethium through fission.
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a descendant of the original laboratory that discovered the element in 1945, implemented a new process last year that enabled the creation of a pure sample of Promethium-147, an isotope of Promethium. After combining this sample with a ligand to form a stable complex in water, the team was finally able to analyze Promethium’s binding properties using X-ray spectroscopy. The results of the study have been published last week in the news Nature.
“Because it has no stable isotopes, promethium was the last lanthanide to be discovered and the most difficult to study,” said Ilja Popovs of ORNL, co-author of the study. said in a press statement. “Anything we would call a modern technology marvel would contain these rare earth elements in some form… we are adding the missing link.”
To take a closer look at the Promethium element, researchers first created a compound known as bispyrrolidine diglycolamide (PyDGA). When this was combined with Promethium, the resulting electron structure of Pm-PyDGA created a pinkish hue, but more importantly, it allowed the scientists to fire X-rays and measure the frequencies absorbed, leading to clues about the chemical bonds of Promethium.
By understanding Promethium and its binding properties, ORNL can produce greater quantities of the rare earth metal while improving the ways to separate it from other lanthanides. That’s because the team successfully demonstrated a phenomenon known as “lanthanide contraction,” which explains how as atomic numbers in the lanthanide series increase, the radii of ions decrease, according to ORNL. This creates a specific chemical and electronic signature, and ORNL scientists recorded a clear “promethium signal,” which will help understand the trend in other rare earth elements.
“You cannot use all these lanthanides as a mixture in modern advanced technologies, because you have to separate them first,” Santa Jansone-Popova, “This is where the contraction becomes very important; it actually allows us to separate them, which is still quite a difficult task.”
So while the Periodic Table of Elements may be a story of humanity’s chemical ingenuity, it is also a scientific story that is still unfolding in laboratories around the world.
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